


Requiescant in Pace

by ReaperWriter



Series: When We Were We [3]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: Angst, F/M, Grief, M/M, Mourning, Multi, canon character death mentioned, the birth of James Flint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-02 11:50:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10217396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ReaperWriter/pseuds/ReaperWriter
Summary: Arriving in New Providence after a long delay, Miranda finds a letter awaiting her, and learns what she should have already known.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently my muse is all about tragedy and angst. Sorry about that. Maybe I will write a fix it fic at something.

A third storm blows them off course and damages the ship. They spend nearly a month on Cuba before repairs are done and they finally make it to New Providence.

Providence is a foreign concept anymore. God’s special care and love. Where was God when the Earl sprung his trap? Where was he when they drug Thomas from their home? Where was he when the Admiral stripped James of his commission and turned him out into the street with nothing?

Miranda is not used to anger. She has tried to live a life based on joy. She has tried to live a life based on pleasure. She has tried to live.  But now anger seethes just under her skin. It burns like the prickly heat between her thighs where they chafe in the hot, moist Caribbean air. She breathes it and it singes her lungs.

The letter waits for them at the tavern when they arrive, filthy from sea travel, thinner and duller. Every day, the light in James’s eyes has dimmed. Less and less is he their bright eyed, brilliant lieutenant. A different man is there. A harder man. One he scares her as much as she still loves him. Thomas balanced the edge inside their lover. He was the balm on James’s soul. She was never her husband’s equal, for all the Thomas never treated her as less then.

The man at the counter, a black man named Scott, asks if she is Mrs. Barlow.

She knows Peter’s handwriting. She’s received so many replies in his hand, accepting or declining invitations to dinner and salons and fetes. She knows it only less well than Thomas’s. Or James’s.

The heavy linen paper brushes her fingers and burns her. It could be good news. In the world with a kind and loving God, it would be good news. News that the Earl has died, that Thomas is free. That he will come soon, join them here and together they’d built the paradise they once dreamed of.

Her hands shake as they travel to the property that Peter acquired for her in the little cart, not nearly as comfortable as the carriages and phaetons she once rode in in style. The daughter of a baron, the wife of an earl’s son. No one now. Nothing.

The letter lays tucked into the fine embroidered pocket at her hip. Unopened. She can’t. Not yet. Not yet.

The property is rough, the house in desperate need of work. The land is overgrown and in need of many firm hands and more than one plow.

They cannot see the sea from the house. James cannot see it, and every mile they drove away from it, another piece of his heart flakes away. She watches it, and by the time they stopped here, he’s a husk.

Their first night is spent on a musty mattress with ragged sheets, mosquitos buzzing around them long after the lantern is blown out.

In the morning, chewing on hard and horrible bread, she traces the edge of the paper again. And again. And again. The paper cuts, a razor thin line of blood welling up like rubies. A kind and merciful God would give them Thomas.

Miranda has not believed in God since stepping foot onto the gangplank of the accursed ship that brought them here.

Drawing the letter out, she breaks the seal.

‘Dear Miranda,

I am so sorry. I regret to inform you…’

“He is dead.” James’s voice startles her and the paper flutters to the ground.

She is surprised to taste the salt of her own tears on her tongue. She turns to find him standing in the doorway, a bucket of well water in his hands.

She can’t find the words. She doesn’t have the words. New. Providence. What a wretched, Goddamned irony. Her fingers point toward the stark white of the paper on the hard packed dirt of the ground.

James merely shakes his head. “I already knew.”

Miranda looked up, eyes wide. “How?”

“I felt it. That day at the rail. There was a moment where I felt him go.” He sets the water down with a slosh. “I thought you knew.”

She shook her head dumbly, because it suddenly made sense. James, her James, their James, had disappeared that day, somewhere out on the water. As surely as the bosun’s mate who’d died on the voyage and been sewn into the canvas shroud and consigned to the sea.

She picked up the letter and read it. Noted the date Peter gave.

The next day, James disappeared before dawn. On the back of the letter, in his precise hand, the words, “I will return as I can.”

Miranda sits for a long time, staring at it in the quiet of the morning. Then she stands, going to a trunk. Removing the Bible she’d taken from the London House, the one in which her marriage was recorded, she makes two entries under the same date.

_Thomas Lord Hamilton, morte._

_Lieutenant James McGraw, morte._

Then Miranda, now Mrs. Barlow, dressed and put on a hat, and prepared to ride into the nearest village. She’d be needing hired hands to make this place home.


End file.
